German-American Discourse on Politics and Culture

June 18, 2017

Sahra Wagenknecht and the Toltalitarian Mindset

Anyone interested in understanding Sahra Wagenknecht's (Deputy Chair of the German Left Party) contempt for parliamentary democracy in Germany - and especially her extreme dislike of the Social Democrats (SPD) - only needs to look into things she has said or written. I found a fascinating essay she wrote in 1992 - two years afterGermany's reunification - in which she had this to say about Josef Stalin:

("And whatever one can criticize about the Stalin era - justifiably or not - its results were in any case not decline and decay, but rather the development of a backward country into a modern great power during a singular historical epoch: including ending misery, hunger, illiteracy, semi-feudal dependencies and capitalist exploitation; and finally defeat of Hitler's army and destroying German and European fascism as well as spreading socialist social programs across half the European continent. In the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1950s we don't see any of the crisis symptoms that plagued socialism in its end phase. We don't see any economic stagnation, no growing gaps to the technical advances in capitalism...")

The bit about "ending hunger" is especially ironic, since Stalin engineered the Holodomor- the man-made famine in the Ukraine of 1932 and 1933 in which between 7 and 10 million people died of starvation. Wagenknecht goes on to state that Stalin enjoyed widespread support among the population and categorically rejects the idea that this support was coerced through a dictatorship or labor camps ("Arbeitslager" - at least she make an oblique reference to the Gulag, where millions were detained).

The entire essay is instructive. Wagenknecht sees Stalin as the logical successor to Lenin, and the leader who put the Soviet Union and the postwar Soviet Bloc countries on a course to surpass the capitalist west. She also has high praise for Walter Ulbricht for remaining true to the Stalinist line. For Wagenknecht, the end of the socialist revolution was the fault of Stalin's successors- especially Brezhnev - who fell for the "imperialist strategy of Détente". With the new policy of rapprochement in the late 1960s and 1970s the revolution stalled and the socialist experiment fell victim to the "internationales Finanzkapital".

Yes, "the tactic was not new". Already in the 1920s Stalin warned against any cooperation with the SPD in Germany. And here the policy of Wandel durch Annäherung” ("change through rapprochement") was the cornerstone of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik. Wagenknecht appears to be reviving Stalin's Sozialfaschismustheorie which held that the Social Democrats and Trade Unionists were just as dangerous as the Nazis and must be crushed. Needless to say, this had a devastating result for anti-fascist unity in Germany and paved the way for the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Even afterthe Nazis took power the leader of the German Communist Party (KPD) Ernst Thälmann continued to hammer the Social Democrats:

Sahra Wagenknecht has never completely refuted or distanced herself from her Stalinist views. Indeed, we see them reflected today in her appeasement policy towards Russian aggression, her hatred of the United States as the center of Finanzkapital, her call to dismantle the NATO trans-Atlantic alliance, and her constant criticism of the "capitalist" political parties - especially the SPD.

Comments

Yes, yes. My own conclusion after studying the history of the Weimar Republic was that the Communists, through their unwillingness to cooperate with the Socialists and moderates, instead of working in solidarity to stop the Nazis, bore a large responsibility for the triumph of the Hitler regime.
The cold war pro-Communist propaganda of Berkeley leftists is a big embarrassment, too, me, too. My parents were taken in by that, and so was I, thinking that anti-Stalinists were just propagandists. How we ate all that up, and how little it did for anybody's good, including our own.
Now we are dealing with "far left" diehards who can't give up those dear old ideas that they (and I) grew up with, and they are severely damaging the Democratic Party. And for what? They will never hold power, and because of them we are stuck with Trump and his crazies. You'd think the election would have taught them a lesson. But no.
Yes, I blame them. They should know better. They should stop being so full of themselves.
It's hard for people to let go, to understand how the world has changed. We have to be realistic!

Have a look on the misearble condition of the SPD today and you have to give Sarah Wagenknecht (and the cited Stalin and Thälmann) logically all right.

Wagenknecht is a very straigt foreward intelectual person and we need such in the politics again. She is allowed to argue this way without exposing herself to the suspicions that the victims of the Stalinist period would not care.

What you are doing here is a new McCarthyism, which has been induced and widely spreaded by the Clinton-network since they have been caught up in crimes against political opponents like Berny Sanders.

Wagenknecht's message only seems to resonate with a few disaffected intellectuals in the West and some older voters in the East nostalgic for the DDR and the Stasi. I'll be surprised if the Left Party achieves 8% in the national election.